MME Balloon Effect (And what I found out)

“What is the MME balloon effect?”
“What does the balloon effect do?”

The MME Balloon Effect
(And what I found out about it)

For a long time, I wanted to do something in MMD that was inspired by Nena’s song, “99 Red Balloons” mostly because the song was stuck in my head for more than a month. So I tried to look for effects that would help me emulate floating balloons. While browsing through BeamManP’s list of effects, I came across “balloon_V2”. Exactly what I was looking for! What the effect does is generate floating balloons, so you don’t have to load a balloon model or accessory one by one.

But that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

When I loaded the .x file in MMD, the balloons were in different colors. Of course, if the balloons came with just one color it would have been bland and boring, right? That wasn’t the case, I needed the balloons to be red! I found that the folder had four .fx files, so I changed the default .fx file that was assigned to the .x file in MME, but the balloons turned green!

I figured that the color of the balloons had to do something with the codes within the .fx files. I tried looking for the line where you could manipulate the colors of the balloons, to no luck. I decided to read again the ReadMe that came with the effect and ran it through a translator. The file ‘model_baloon.fx’ was made for model files, while

‘normal_baloon.fx’ was made for accessory files. Bearing that in mind, I decided to try it out.

Enter my test subject: Animasa’s Hatsune Miku!

I loaded her up in MMD and applied ‘model_baloon.fx’ via MME. Much to my surprise, the effect made floating copies of Miku, and due to her being a full model, my laptop couldn’t handle it and started to slow down.

Then I tried it on an accessory. I made a single red balloon and turned it into an .x file, loaded it up on MMD and added ‘normal_baloon.fx’ on MME. And this was the result: